Episode 136: D&C 37 – Sections 53 and 54

In the aftermath of the LDS Church’s first major business meeting Joseph Smith continues to solve short-term problems by sending everyone to Missouri. We spend the first half of the episode talking about why the entire country was moving to Missouri because of the absolutely horrid Indian Removal Act just put into place by President Jackson. The Mormons didn’t do anything to influence or support this act! They sure do benefit from it though (in the short-term, at least).

While I was at it, I finally fixed that annoying bug that was cropping off the “Amen”s at the ends of the sections. I had a bug before that was duplicating the last difference in the text, and I naively just whacked off that last difference, thinking I was always duplicating it for some reason. But in most cases, I was whacking off a non-duplicated difference. So I found the source of the duplication, and now everything is good. If anyone is interested in the code, it’s on https://github.com/joelakuhn/dc-compare/. Fair warning, it does look like something written in a weekend. It’s not super pretty.

Poor Leman Copley is having a rough time since he reneged on his arrangement to let the Colesville Saints live on his property “in return for making improvements upon it.” Besides flying through a window and being possessed by an evil spirit Joseph Smith now says it would have been better for Copley to have “drowned in the depth of the sea.” I find this sentiment expressed by Joseph concerning retribution towards Leman so immensely sad, but it is an example of the use of fear by religious leaders to try and keep their members in line. Leman is also excommunicated at this time (of course); he does rejoin the Mormons in 1832, but he never went west with the Brighamites (see Wikipedia).